Rapid eLearning | Adobe Captivate Blog

The workflow to do screen recordings has been changed in Adobe Captivate 4. The new workflow is more intuitive and user friendly. But do you sometimes feel that you are not able to position your recording area on the application exactly as you want.

For example – You want to record the browser window .In the scenario below you are not able to clearly position the window since the buttons of the capture window are blocking the browser window at corners

Would it help you if you were to hide the buttons and then reposition and resize the capture window. Press ALT and H key simultaneously. The window will look like the image below with buttons gone. You can position the capture window wherever you want.

When you are done press ALT and H simultaneously again. The buttons will come back as in image below –

captivate 4 capture tips and tricks

“I’m creating a demo on how to access a particular website. For distribution reasons I’m using a low res 800 X 600. This means that web pages need a lot of scrolling to navigate them. When playing back, the scrolling happens OK but then the image appears to jump back to the beginning of the scroll so that the mouse movements and text captions that follow are, although in the place they should be in relation to the viewing screen, are not pointing at the right bit of the web page.”

I am sure most of you must have experienced this scenario while capturing scrollbars using Adobe Captivate. Please see the following Captivate movie to get a hang of the issue, which is not exactly an issue but a preference option not utilised…. 

In order to avoid this issue please follow these steps prior to start automatic recording:

• Launch Captivate and press Shift + F8. This launches the preferences dialog.
• Browse to recording -> Settings.
• On the right hand side there is a checkbox capture interim screenshot
• Uncheck this option. Press Ok.

Now if you start automatic recording and  do the same scenario you would not run into the above issue.

Now in case if you face this issue and you are a position where-in you cannot re-capture then please see the following Captivate demo. This demo shows how to get the correct the slide image during edit time.

captivate,recording,preferences,interim screenshot

var addthis_pub=”shameerayyappan”;

try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-7747520-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}

VTML (VoiceText Markup Language) – This Powerful hidden gem in Text to Speech helps you control the generated speech by adding pause, changing the pitch etc !

This post on customizing text to speech Pronunciations received many comments requesting a way to control the generated speech with html like tags.

The interesting thing is that this feature is already there in Captivate 4 ! Even more interesting is the fact that it is so simple to use. All you need to do is insert the appropriate tags into the slide notes. You can type in (or copy paste) the tags just like you do any other text.

Just before making this post, I quickly tried few of them:
1. Hello I am here <vtml_pause time="1000"/> for a break: Introduces a pause of 1 sec in between.
2. <vtml_speed value="50"> This is my text </vtml_speed>: Helps you control the speed of the text

There are many more similar useful tags. The VTML tags are listed in the Appendix C of the document here. It has a examples as well on the usage.

adobe eLearning suite and articulate presenter,migrating old eLearning projects

Adobe eLearning suite consists of a set of products along with Adobe Captivate 4 and Adobe Presenter 7 using which you can create any kind of eLearning courses. With this you will not need any other eLearning tool in your arsenal. But when organizations decide to switch to a new product their foremost worry could be about existing content they have created using other tools. Well you need not worry about losing them. You can still use them inside Adobe Captivate and other products in eLearning suite.

For example – Files created in Articulate® Presenter can be opened and edited in Adobe Presenter. The original Articulate presentation is never modified; a copy of the presentation is converted and opened in Adobe Presenter. The Articulate assets folder should be available along with the Articulate presentation file. Without the asset folder and its contents, Articulate features cannot be imported into the presentation when it is opened in Adobe Presenter.

Adobe Presenter supports most Articulate Presenter data, including Flash, audio, and quiz information (as long as the Articulate Presenter assets folder is available).

What is not supported –

1. The following Articulate Presenter features are not supported: Learning Games, Engage Interactions, Insert Web Object.
2. Adobe Presenter does not support all Articulate Presenter question types. Unsupported questions are not imported during the conversion process. A detailed log report (ConversionLog.log) is generated at the end of the conversion process and provides details about the conversion, including an dropped questions.”

For complete details visit Adobe Presenter 7 help files. This is how you can do it –

In PowerPoint, open a presentation (PPT or PPTX file) created in Articulate Presenter.

1. In the conversion dialog box, click Yes.
2. Choose a name and save location for the converted presentation.
3. (Optional) To view information in the conversion log file, click View Log. (You can also use Windows Explorer at any time to view thelog file. Navigate to the location you specified in step 3, right-click the ConversionLog.log file, and select Open with > Notepad.)
4. After the conversion process finishes, click Close.
5. In Adobe Presenter, edit the new, converted file and add Adobe Presenter features as desired.

Click here or on the image below to see how to do it.It will open up Adobe Captivate 4 generated file.

Next post – We will see how you can use output files of Articulate inside Adobe Captivate 4.

Some Cp4 users have reported that when the Aggregator starts playing content movies- in certain scenarios sound from subsequent movies in the aggregator plays for a fraction of a second while the first movie is still playing. This issue is prominently seen in Firefox browser, although it occurs in Internet explorer some times.

There is an easy workaround for this issue:

Continue reading…

Adobe Captivate 4,Captivate library

Captivate accepts high quality images, animations, FLVs, audio files etc. Content generation is an iterative process and hence content developers use these resources across different sections of their project, and even across multiple projects. Captivate keeps track of all your resources to allow you to use it the next time. All these resources are placed in the  "Captivate Library".

Let’s look at this basic but very powerful functionality which Adobe Captivate provides.

So, where is this ‘Library’ located?

Once you launch Adobe Captivate and open a blank project, go to Edit view and from the menu item select ‘Window > Library’ or use the shortcut ‘ctrl-alt-L’

Library will show you the way it classifies your resources. i.e. Audio, Background, Images, Media and Presentations. Any resource you insert in your Captivate project will be placed in the library under appropriate category. Now let’s look at the key features the Captivate library provides -

a] Easy access to resources

How often do you use the same image,audio clip or the same animation in a single project. Once you import the resource for the first time, you can just identify the resource in the library and drag and drop it on your slide the next time. Easy, isnt it!

b] Use resources from another CP file

Same resources are used in many different projects. Hence the library allows you to open and use the resources of any other Captivate project. To do this, just use the button ‘Open Library’ > click it and then point it to the other Captivate project.

c] Import many resources in a single step

You know in advance which all resources you are going to use in you project. In this case,the Library allows you to Import many resources at a time. Thus it will save time. Now you can use resources from library and drag and drop on the concerned slide.

d] Details about Size, Usage

It’s very important to keep an eye on the size of final published swf. Although .swf compresses the data, lesser the size of original project, better it is. Hence you can keep a check on the resource file sizes from the library itself. Library gives the size details for each resource you import inside Captivate.

Wondering where all you have used a specific resource. It’s easy to find. Just identify the resource in the library, right click and select ‘usage’. Captivate gives you the slides on which the selected resource has been used.

e] Delete unused resources

Last but not the least, a very powerful utility, "Delete unused resources". As I said, content creation is an iterative process and the user inserts and removes many images, videos etc. Once removed from slide, they still continue to exist inside the Captivate project. This is done to allow you to use it, whenever needed, right from the library. But once your CP file size increases, it’s always better to remove all unused resources from the Captivate project. To allow this, Captivate provides a small button just at the top of library, "Select unused items". Click it to select all the resources which are not being used in Captivate project. Right next to it is the ‘Delete’ button. It allows you to delete all these selected unused resources from the Captivate project.

These and many more functionalities are provided by Captivate library. Do use it and make your life simpler!

Captivate,cp files disappearing,e-learning

Some Captivate 3 users have faced a strange and unfortunate problem of .cp file suddenly disappearing after saving and closing the captivate. A possible reason for this has been analyzed and fixed in Captivate 4.

However for the Captivate 3 users I can suggest a possible workaround to recover the project. If this problem happens, immediately look for a .tmp file (after closing Captivate) in the same folder where your .cp file was supposed to be. If you are able to find this then you are lucky – Rename this file to .cp and you can continue working then on. You might also notice in certain cases, that this .tmp file is much larger size than the original .cp file. This is but nothing to worry – next save on the renamed file will reduce this size back to normal.

Adobe Captivate,Captivate TOC

Image 1. Default TOC

Image 1 shows the default captions in TOC that Adobe Captivate creates. Captivate allows us to change the captions in TOC so that the TOC can look like the example shown in Image 2.

Image 2. TOC with changed captions

Now let’s see how we can do it.

Continue reading…